Wednesday, April 2, 2014

The Cats in My Parking Lot Straight Up Own Me

by: Ben Seeder

It’s become clear they’re growing less and less afraid of me, if
they ever were. Whatever fear I once induced in them has been replaced by
familiarity and total lack of consequence. There are dozens and dozens of
cats that live all around my apartment building and I can’t stop them. I can
barely contain them. They flock to my building because the elderly Hispanic
woman who lives above me has made it the mission of her last few years on
Planet Earth to make sure all of the stray cats in the Westlake/MacArthur Park
area of Los Angeles eat like kings, placing large aluminum trays of cat food at
a consistency somewhere between liquid and solid on the ground eight small
steps from my front door. Because neither of us have regular jobs, I get
to observe all her daily machinations first hand. They consist of waking
up, hosing any residual cat excrement off the steps and walkways of the
building entrance, collecting any dead rodents that may or may not have been
ceremoniously placed in the walkway, retreating back to her room in hot
anticipation of Meals On Wheels, and the rest of the day is devoted to feeding
the cats, with a possible diversion to search the garbage for glass bottles. She
recently seems to have acquired a new boyfriend. He’s old, and very
quiet.

Any window I look out of from my apartment will provide me with a
no-holds-barred view of any number of cats. It should be clarified that
these are not shelter cleaned and combed cats but rough around the edges ghetto
strays who have been to the rodeo. Their fur is coarse and filthy. They trust
no one. One of them, who a girl in my building has nicknamed “Stumbles”,
has a broken wrist and due to him walking on it continuously a gigantic callus
has formed obliquely around the wrist bending his paw inwards and he uses it as
a makeshift crutch to walk around with. It has been pointed out to me
that since Stumbles is a stray the option of taking him to a Vet who would
surgically re-break his wrist and consign him to a small cage alone until his
wrist has healed properly is an impossibility, as he would lose his mind.

When I open the front door to leave my apartment the first thing I
can count on is at least two cats bounding in either direction, startled by
this abrupt change in their time and space. From there it’s a short walk
to the building’s front gate where various cats will scurry back and forth,
near my ankles. When I arrive at my car there is most likely at least two
cats comfortably perched on the hood of my car, sunning themselves languidly.
Upon noticing my arrival one jumps off immediately but looks back right
away to see if I’m serious while the other stays put glaring at me as if to say
“What are you doing here?” but I’m like “Fuck that, what are YOU doing here?
You’re just a cat!”. After the final cat rockets himself off my
property I get in, sit down and take a moment. My windshield is dotted
with paw prints and as I look through the glass I notice an additional cat
perched on the corner of the garage roof above my car staring down at me.
I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure this is what the Army refers to as
“having the upper hand”. Once I came out to my car and the aluminum tray
they feed from was resting on my hood and that’s where I draw the god damn
line.

I can’t blame the old woman for needing a hobby as the sun sets on
her twilight years, she’s certainly nice enough. She refers to me as
“Pappa” which pleases me immensely. Where the whole thing gets a bit
arrogant is the assumption that there’s no way other hardworking people who pay
the exact same amount of rent wouldn’t also want to live in a stray cat
fantasia. Where it gets unpleasant is that when it’s known amongst the
animal kingdom that there’s a bottomless supply of free food handed distributed
on a daily basis, you’ll never believe this, but it ends up attracting not only
stray cats but also raccoons and possum, often in broad daylight. I’ve
seen how the cats respond to the possum lurking about and if they were one
tenth afraid of me as they were this possum I’d really be in business. I
threw a glass of water on a possum once and it was pissed but it didn’t step to
me. I have a clear and distinct memory of looking out my front window
during a conversation with my manager who was informing me I wouldn’t be
getting a job I was under the impression the contract of which would be coming
in that morning. While I’m listening to this alarming news I’m watching a
raccoon greedily stuffing his hands into the aluminum tray of cat food and
subsequently pawing the food into his mouth, all the while glancing over his
shoulder, in broad daylight. As it turns out, raccoons fingers are long
and adept. There was undoubtedly a connection between the raccoon’s
thievery and the news I was receiving but I’m not interested in exploring it.

But back to the old woman. I have an image of her also
frozen into my mind from weeks ago that I use liberally in cases of total
emergency when I must instantly rid myself of an unwanted erection and that’s
the image of her smiling at me, maniacal and toothless with chunks of cat food
clumped into her unkempt hair underneath the bright glare of the Godlessly
punishing sun of Los Angeles.

Cats are like the shadiest girl at the bar, and everyone knows it.
I’ve hated them for years. The best cats act like chilled out dogs.
Girls love cats. That’s no secret.
They buy cat sweaters and put pictures of cats as their profile pictures
and purchase as many cats as their roommates, loved ones, or fear of being made
fun of allow. “Oh my God, you’re a total cat lady”, “No bitch, YOU are!”
they say to each other. They send each other emails of cats dressed in human
clothes or as popular characters from TV and Film. My own deep mistrust
of cats was cemented over eight years ago, when a girl I was dating requested I
periodically check in with her two cats who were treated better than most human
beings while she went back home to Memphis. As she had state of the art
machines that automatically dispensed food to these monsters at carefully timed
intervals, my job was primarily to change their water, spend some time with
them, make sure they weren’t dead, etc. The first time I dropped by they
were on relatively good behavior, though sitting side by side and carefully
watching every move I made with their heads tilted slightly to the left.
I was about to go out for the evening and was having some drinks while
throwing on a mix CD that would have blown anyone’s mind. I may or may
not have danced, but I do remember them sitting there, barely moving.
Just watching me. Cut to three days later when I stop by to check
in on them again. I open the door and immediately notice various clothing
items carelessly strewn across the floor. Not a big deal, but they’d
clearly gotten into something. I notice that both cats are seated next to
each other across the room from me, gazing vacantly out the sliding glass door
that overlooked the skyline. I sit down and am instantly hit with an
unpleasant smell. I walk into the girls room, awkwardly groping around in
the dark in search of the light switch, eventually meandering my way into the
bathroom adjacent to her room. Upon turning on the bathroom light, I
notice that one of the cats has taken a dump on her bath mat. I lift the
bath mat by the edges and angle the dried out dump into the toilet where it is
promptly flushed, all future cleanings and bath mat sanitations safely labeled
as “Not my problem”.

Confident I have adroitly identified the cause of the smell, I sit
back down and try to relax yet the smell persists. The cats remain seated
with their backs to me. After giving a once over to the rest of the
apartment, I return to the bedroom to investigate, this time successfully
locating the main light switch to her room. When the lights come on I’m
horrified to discover that these cats had no joke taken turns taking dumps on
this girls bed literally thirteen different times. After staring
expressionless at all of the mounds for several seconds the deeply disturbing
psychological implications of what had happened began to dawn on me.
These cats absolutely knew where their litter boxes were and knew how to
use them. This was a deliberate, clear and calculated message. This
was them saying “This is what we think of you leaving town without us” and
“This is what we think of the boner you brought in to check on us”.

It’s a vulgar story, I know, and I feel awkward telling it to
people but this actually happened and I’ll never forget it. It’s one of the
most fucked up things that’s ever happened to me. I ran out of the room
to go look them in the eye and there they were, with their backs turned to me,
looking out the window, just staring. They knew what they did. I’ve tried
to wash my hands of cats completely since that day. Yet here I am.

The cats around my building watch me just as much as I watch them.
When I leave my door open for a while to air out my apartment, inevitably
I’ll catch one of them trying to creep into my home, but slowly, because they
know they’re about to get flexed on. These cats know all my secrets and
failures. I know for a fact these cats hook up with each other. During
the day they rest, bathing themselves and laying about but never not paying
attention. A lot of times they’ll fight each other, and the only thing
crazier than the sound is watching it happen. Have you ever seen two cats
fight each other? It’s the oddest thing. One of them will swipe at the
other and then the two cats will engage in the most intense staring contest
you’ve ever seen, their faces inches apart and this lasts for seconds or
minutes at a time. They don’t move. They just stare directly at
each other, daring the other one to make the next move. It’s crazy. They
don’t fight too much though, as they all mutually understand they’ve got a good
thing going on here with this old woman. After God knows how many years on the
streets, it would be pretty stupid to fuck up now, and above all cats aren’t
stupid. They’re smarter than me. I know that now.

At night I dream I’m being lead through the ocean to my execution
by several armed military officers with cat heads. The sky and the water
and everything else is tinted purple. Even though it’s the middle of the
ocean, we all tread comfortably on some kind of sand bar. The cats are
armed with rifles and machine guns and they’re leading me to my execution as
the purple sun is coming up. My arms and legs are bound in well-chained
cuffs. The sun is slowly coming up and everything is purple.
Knowing these cats are about to execute me, I decide to make a dash for
it, but the slack from the chains only goes so far and I quickly trip and fall
to my knees. Just as one of the cats is swinging the butt of his rifle
directly down into my face I wake up and start over again.